A Great Long Run & Some Sprintervals

Hey folks, hope y'all had a great weekend!  On Saturday I was able to get out and run my furthest distance since I ran the Disney Marathon way back in January and it went better than I could have ever hoped.  I ended up putting in a little over 30K (19 miles) in just over 2 hours.  It was a pretty decent day for running and I was well dressed for it, but by the time I got home my fingers were frozen.  I think I have pretty poor circulation and my fingers get cold fairly easily, and although I wore gloves they were not happy.  I had actually decided to take water with me for once as my last few long runs have been sans water (terrible, I know).  Usually the park route in the city has water fountains, but they have all been shut off or just removed outright for the winter months.  Those last few runs were getting a bit dicey near the end as I would fizzle out and just be thinking about getting a drink, so carry my own bottle it was.  I think it was the cold water that really iced my digits, but other than sore hands I felt great when I was done.  Actual distance was 30.7km (19.2 miles) at a 4:08/km pace (6:37/mile).  It was also my fastest 30K time at 2:03:52, over 20 minutes faster than I ran the Around the Bay 30K race back in March (though I was hurt for that one).

After my run I has a nice quiet afternoon with the kids and we got packed up to go to the cottage.  We also took some time out to go grab coffee and hot chocolates at Starbucks…

Michelle was sad she missed out as she was stuck at work.

Once Michelle got home we loaded the truck and set off for the cottage.  We spent the night at my parent's place and played games and I got to have a couple of Guinness's.  The next day it was off for some more running up at the cottage.  I hadn't done any Yasso 800's this training block so I thought maybe I would give that a go.  The roads and the cottage are pretty straight and flat, so not a bad option if you don't have access to a track.

I did a short warmup and then jumped into my 800's.  I didn't quite remember the workout so I didn't end up doing it quite right…it is supposed to be 10 intervals of 800m with your recovery period being as long as the interval itself (ie, run 800m in 3:10, jog for 3:10), but I only did half the recovery time.  Needless to say, this probably made things a bit more difficult for me.  Also, as dumb as this sounds, I kinda forgot I was even doing intervals a couple of times and would just settle into my regular pace.  I would then remember "Right!  I'm supposed to be running intervals!" and get  the speed back up…oops.  Anyways, when it was all said and done my average 800 time was 2:59, not too bad at all.

Nice to see some improvement from when I ran these last year, and just imagine if I actually let myself recover between intervals and focused on running them

Do you put much stock in race-predicting workouts?